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Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

bbc.com

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Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#461

Post by poszlem »

baxtr wrote: post #66

I have no clue what Twitter will be turned into by Musk. I also don’t have a very strong opinion about the entire situation or about the changes he’s implementing right now. But here is what concerns me: the speed of execution. Ofc speed matters a lot in startups. But Twitter is a not a startup anymore. Compare that to when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. He took some weeks (months?) to understand what was going on ins…

We know that from the released texts, that Musk is a close friend of Jack Dorsey, so I would expect him to have necessary intel in place for months.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#462

Post by eternalban »

poszlem wrote: post #460
eternalban wrote: post #457

"jump" ratio = 230,000 / 400,000,000,000 = 0.0575% of users. The English are masters of understatement, which is why BBC did not say "users leap" and used the word jump instead .. Shouldn't BBC wait just a bit, like a month, before breathlessly telling us how users are jumping to another network? Do you think stories like this may influence people to leap or jump to Mastedon? And would you characterize this piece by…

Isn't that the whole point of that article? When the exact same thing happened to a different political option (people moving to Parler, or Gab) the whole coverage was about making the move as unpalatable as possible. It is 100% making news at the moment, and it is quite obvious that mainstream journalists are a bit uneasy about no longer being the protected cast on Twitter.

I don't see the Musk regime as a different political option. The case you refer to was clearly a partisan affair.

This is a systemic response by BBC.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-pa...

Did this 'chap' get the ax by Elon? Asking for a friend ..

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#463

Post by slg »

phpisthebest wrote: post #412
frereubu wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies do care what their ads appear alongside, because of the outrage tweets and because, en masse, people / the media aren't mature enough to separate ad space and user-generated content.

No a very loud, very vocal, minority of users that have an extreme authoritarian world view and will create the appearance of wide scale social outrage where there is none will scare marketers.. Of course if they had any real data on the impact of their ads they probally will realize that none of the ads are effective anyway. I have never once saw a twitter ad for a large national fast food place, or a car company an…

>I have never once saw a twitter ad for a large national fast food place, or a car company and said "hey I need to go buy from them"

Almost no one thinks advertising works on them, but that comes from a misunderstanding of what ads are trying to accomplish. Mercedes doesn't expect you to see a Twitter ad then go out and buy a $60k car. They advertise to establish their brand so that when you do decide to buy a car, you have a perception of Mercedes that is at least partially built through the years of advertisements you have seen from them.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#464

Post by chx »

frereubu wrote: post #371
Thorentis wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't think companies care what their ads appear alongside. They care about a Twitter user posting an outrage tweet with a screenshot of an ad for a Burger appearing next to the N word. As if we aren't mature enough yet to separate ad space and user generated content.

Companies do care what their ads appear alongside, because of the outrage tweets and because, en masse, people / the media aren't mature enough to separate ad space and user-generated content.

Especially because Twitter design makes it hard to separate them. There's a small text "promoted tweet" but that's it. No background, border anything to help telling them apart.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#465

Post by baby »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #290
baby wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is not just about the cypherphunk culture, actually it's far from that IMO. It's much more about the startup and product culture. It was started by a VC after all. Personally, I'm happy to read realistic and pragmatic comments here. Mastodon is not going to kill twitter. The headline is frustratingly clickbaity. What's nice is that it will get a nice bump of users thanks to this article, and the project will be st…

Mastodon may very well kill Twitter. What make you think that a company with descent financial backing can't scale a Mastodon instance to Twitter-size levels?

Is there a historical precedent for this? An distributed version of a centralized system winning? My only example is email and it's horrible.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#466

Post by godelski »

colordrops wrote: post #458
godelski wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we stop pretending that email is a great example of decentralized networks? Modern email is extremely centralized with most people on either Gmail, Apple, or Outlook. No one rolls their own server. Email on the other hand is a great example of how decentralized things become centralized over time due to the network effect. There's even a weak network effect with email and it still happened.

This is the same flawed logic that claims that Bitcoin is really centralized. You are looking at the wrong properties when you call email centralized. With email, as with Bitcoin, you can participate in the network and roll your own if you so wish, and no one can prevent you from transacting. That doesn't mean most should roll their own, but the fact that it's possible is a vast and fundamental difference. I really d…

> This is the same flawed logic that claims that Bitcoin is really centralized.

Except it isn't because centralization-decentralization is not a binary discrete variable but a continuous one. There's a reason the trilemma exists and you score on each axis. No coin is at any extreme.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#467

Post by robbiemitchell »

ryukafalz wrote: post #63
robbiemitchell wrote: post #40

> The first thing you have to do when you sign up is choose a server > It doesn't hugely matter which one you are on because you will be able to follow users on all the others anyway > The server you choose becomes part of your user name > Unlike Twitter, Mastodon won't suggest followers you may be interested in OK, so this shouldn't be the first step unless the "server" is a key part of the experience or has other b…

> OK, so this shouldn't be the first step unless the "server" is a key part of the experience or has other benefits. It is; the local timeline of the server you pick is often the best way to discover new people as a new user. It becomes progressively less important as you build out your network (I hardly look at it these days) but for bootstrapping as a new user it helps.

The important point here is that this puts a big decision in front of people before they get started, rather than treating this as something more like a post-signup engagement vehicle.

For general adoption, every ounce of friction has to be removed from signup.

Furthermore, reading the docs here[1]:

> Before you sign up for a service, it is important to understand its policies and terms of use. A Mastodon website will usually have its policies listed on the /about/more page, which can be found by clicking “learn more” on the landing page while not logged in to that website.

Every server can have different terms?

> Mastodon allows website administrators to set one of three different signup modes

:facepalm:

[1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/signup/

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#468

Post by colordrops »

boredtofears wrote: post #34
colordrops wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is run just like this and it has plenty of reach.

Most companies don’t run their own email servers, either.

But they could. You can't run your own twitter instance and communicate with other Twitter users.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#469

Post by stormbrew »

bombcar wrote: post #227
stormbrew wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies wouldn't have open registration. They'd run it like any other corporate resource, integrated into their ldap/ad/sso solution and with a corporate policy for what their employees could do on it. Ya know, like their email servers.

I mean, company blogs still exist, as empty and as dead as they've always been.

Yeah and for Nike I think that'd be true here too. But for, say, Wired? Probably more active/useful.

That's the biggest corporate comms use of Twitter anyways, outside "Twitter as support short line" which is honestly both incredibly obnoxious and really unfair to users not on Twitter so I think it's a good thing it might die.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#470

Post by zaik »

neetdeth wrote: post #379
dorfsmay wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would LOVE if there was a way to federate FB, instagram, twitter, etc... You post and read on your preferred platform but can see posts from your friends from other platforms, or even their own implementation on their own server!

You're describing a federation of platforms, and this can work, at least technically. XMPP worked wonderfully for a brief moment. Unfortunately, profit incentives are aligned against it. The Fediverse, at least as I see it advocated here, is not a federation of platforms but a federation of social cliques, where your ability to communicate with someone else is determined by connectivity in the clique graph. This is a…

XMPP still works wonderfully if you want to setup a chat server for your friends and family and be independent from all the walled garden messaging apps.
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